Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
A major American city is unsuccessful in its bid for the Summer Olympic Games and the Right cheers.
Our President is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and the Right falls into line with the Taliban, Hamas and Iran to criticize the award.
Rachel Maddow has an explanation on how the Nobel Peace Prize works. Aung San Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for winning an election to be prime minister of Burma and then being denied the office. The Nobel Peace Prize is often awarded to give people moral authority, not for a long record.
But none of that matters to the Right.
I do not want to fall into the same mistake that the Right did for eight years, of conflating the president with the nation. But I find it repellent that there now is a track record on the Right of cheering for bad things to happen to this country and tut-tutting when things go well. I find it hard to escape the conclusion that if there were to be a serious terrorist attack in an American city during the Obama Presidency, the Right would be standing up and cheering for the attackers.
Rachel Maddow: "The American president just won the Nobel Peace Prize. By any reasonable measure, all Americans should be proud."
Those Americans who are not proud ought to re-examine where their loyalties lie. For it seems to me that they are loyal not to this country, but to their ideology. These are the same people who would have seen the American economy go into free-fall last year if they had had their way about it, because that is what their ideology demanded. These are the same people who wanted a constitutional amendment to ban desecrating the American Flag, but when one of their conservative lights (an old television actor) said that anyone displaying the modern 50 star flag should first soak it in tea, not a single conservative that I am aware of bothered to point out that was an act of desecrating the Flag.
The Right would destroy this nation if they saw a political advantage in doing so.They are not Americans who are conservative politically. They are Conservatives who just happen, by an accident of birth, to be Americans.
It's nice that Europe, at least, thinks America's current approach to foreign relations is more constructive than the previous. Unfortunately, I fall in line with the Taliban and Iran in thinking that this award is for too little actual accomplishment. Maybe in a few years Obama will have done something to earn the award, and maybe he won't.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, I don't like loyalty tests no matter who's giving them. If the DNC wants to portray criticism of the President as being in league with the Taliban, I have a simple suggestion - tell him to start working for us, instead of the banks and the insurance companies. Loyalty will promptly follow.
Cujo "bin" 359
It's not that they hate America. It's that they hate 80% of Americans and anyone else who thinks differently then they do. Though "thinks" may not be quite the right word.
ReplyDeleteBill, my brother had a subscription to Mad Magazine when I was a kid. One cartoon in it defined a "superpatriot" as "someone who loves America while hating 93% of its people."
ReplyDeleteI've learned that there is a lot of truth to that.